The Swan Book Read online

  THE SWAN BOOK

  OTHER BOOKS BY ALEXIS WRIGHT

  PLAINS OF PROMISE

  GROG WAR

  CROIRE EN L’INCROYABLE

  LE PACTE DE SERPENT

  TAKE POWER (AS EDITOR)

  CARPENTARIA

  ALEXIS WRIGHT

  The Swan Book

  FIRST PUBLISHED 2013

  FROM THE WRITING & SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE

  AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY

  BY THE GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING COMPANY

  PO BOX 752

  ARTARMON NSW 1570 AUSTRALIA

  WWW.GIRAMONDOPUBLISHING.COM

  © ALEXIS WRIGHT 2013

  DESIGNED BY HARRY WILLIAMSON

  TYPESET BY ANDREW DAVIES

  IN 10/17 PT BASKERVILLE

  PRINTED AND BOUND BY LIGARE BOOK PRINTERS

  DISTRIBUTED IN AUSTRALIA BY NEWSOUTH BOOKS

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

  CATALOGUING -IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  ALEXIS WRIGHT

  THE SWAN BOOK / ALEXIS WRIGHT

  ISBN 9781922146410 (PBK.)

  9781922146427 (mobi)

  9781922146434 (epub)

  978-1922146441 (epdf)

  A823.3

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS ELECTRONIC MECHANICAL PHOTOCOPYING OR OTHERWISE WITHOUT THE PRIOR PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

  FOR TOLY

  All those travelling black swans

  Gone to desert lagoons after big rains

  In the Todd River next to Schultz Crossing

  And thirty flying north along Larapinta Drive in Alice Springs on the 14 January 2010

  And in memory of Yari Tjampitjinpa

  (Kumantjayi Zimran)

  THE SWAN BOOK is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute young woman called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright’s previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best-seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements, drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale, has Oblivia Ethylene in the company of amazing characters like Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Big Red and the Mechanic, a talking monkey called Rigoletto, three genies with doctorates, and throughout, the guiding presence of swans.

  Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in Tennant Creek, and the novels Plains of Promise and Carpentaria, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Awards and the ALS Gold Medal, and was published in the US, UK, China, Italy, France, Spain and Poland. She is a Distinguished Fellow in the University of Western Sydney’s Writing and Society Research Centre.

  Cover image: Darren Gilbert

  Black Swan (2012)

  Ink on Illustration Board

  Cover design: Harry Williamson

  Author photo: Vincent Long

  CONTENTS

  Prelude: Ignis Fatuus

  Dust Cycle

  The Dust Ends

  The News from the Sea

  Brolga and Swan

  Twenty Years of Swans

  The Yellow Chat’s Story

  Swan Maiden

  Owls in the Grass

  A Lake of White Water

  The Christmas House

  City Swan

  Gypsy Swans

  City of Refugees

  The Street Serpent

  Travelling Road Show

  The Ghost Walk

  Marsh Lake Swans

  Epilogue: The Swan Country

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements

  A wild black swan in a cage

  Puts all of heaven in a rage

  Robert Adamson, ‘After William Blake’

  Prelude

  Ignis Fatuus

  Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll’s house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighbourhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains.

  Inside the doll’s house the virus manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal, and if it sees a white flag unfurling, it fires missiles from a bazooka through the window into the flat, space, field or whatever else you want to call life. The really worrying thing about missile-launching fenestrae is what will be left standing in the end, and which splattering of truths running around in my head about a story about a swan with a bone will last on this ground.

  So my brain is as stuffed as some old broken-down Commodore you see left dumped in the bush. But I manage. I stumble around through the rubble. See! There I go – zigzagging like a snake over hot tarmac through the endless traffic. Here I am – ducking for cover from screeching helicopters flying around the massive fireplume storms. And then, I recognise a voice droning from far away, and coming closer.

  Oblivia! The old swan woman’s ghost voice jumps right out of the ground in front of me, even though she has been dead for years. White woman still yelling out that name! Where’s that little Aboriginal kid I found? No name. Mudunyi? Oblivion Ethyl(ene) officially. She asks: What are you doing girl? I never taught you to go around looking like that. Her hard eyes look me up and down. The skin and bone. My hair cut clean to the scalp with a knife. I am burnt the same colour as the ground. She takes in the view of the burnt earth, and says, I never expected you to come back here. The ghost says she still recognises the child she had once pulled from the bowels of an old eucalyptus tree that had looked as though it could have been a thousand years old. But this is no place for ghosts that don’t belong here, and the virus barks continuously, as though he was some kind of watchdog barking, Oooba, booblah, booblah! The old woman’s ghost is as spooked as a frightened cat in flight by the virus’s sick laughter carrying across the charred landscape. It frightens the living daylights out of her, although she still manages to say, I know who you are, before swiftly backing off across the landscape until she disappears over the horizon.

  If you want to extract a virus like this from your head – you can’t come to the door of its little old-fashion prairie house with passé kinds of thinking, because the little king will not answer someone knocking, will not come out of the door to glare into the sunlight, won’t talk about anything in level terms, or jump around to appease you like some Chubby Checker impersonator bent over backwards under a limbo stick. Nor will it offer any hospitality – swart summers or not – no matter how much knocking, trick-or-treating, ceremonial presents, or tantrums about why the door was kept closed.

  I can prove that I have this virus. I have kept the bit of crumpled-up paper, the proper results of medical tests completed by top doctors of the scientific w
orld. They claimed I had a remarkable brain. Bush doctors, some of the best in the world, said this kind of virus wasn’t any miracle; it was just one of those poor lost assimilated spirits that thought about things that had originated somewhere else on the planet and got bogged in my brain. Just like assimilation of the grog or flagon, or just any kamukamu, which was not theirs to cure.

  The virus was nostalgia for foreign things, they said, or what the French say, nostalgie de la boue; a sickness developed from channelling every scrap of energy towards an imaginary, ideal world with songs of solidarity, like We Shall Overcome. My virus sings with a special slow drawling voice, like an Australian with closed door syndrome – just singing its heart out about cricket or football without a piece of thought, like Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song – Day oh! Oh! Day a day oh! Daylight come and I want to go home, etc. Well! There was nothing wrong with that. It could sing its homesick head off to the universe of viruses living in the polluted microscopic cities of the backwater swamp etched in my brain.

  The extreme loser, not happy with having trapped itself in my brain, was acting like it had driven a brand new Ferrari into the biggest slum of a dirty desert in one of the loneliest places in the world, and there had to fit high culture into a hovel. The doctors said it was a remarkable thing, an absolute miracle that nobody else had ended up with a virus like this freak lost in my head, after testing thousands of fundamentalists of one kind or another. They called medical testing a waste of public money and drank polluted swamp water to prove it.

  Having learnt how to escape the reality about this place, I have created illusionary ancient homelands to encroach on and destroy the wide-open vista of the virus’s real-estate. The prairie house is now surrounded with mountainous foreign countries that dwarf the plains and flatlands in their shadows, and between the mountains, there are deserts where a million thirsty people have travelled, and to the coastlines, seas that are stirred by King Kong waves that are like monsters roaring at the front door. Without meeting any resistance whatsoever, I have become a gypsy, addicted to journeys into these distant illusionary homelands, to try to lure the virus hidden somewhere in its own crowded globe to open the door. This is where it begins as far as I am concerned. This is the quest to regain sovereignty over my own brain.

  So I lie in the brochures that I send the virus, saying I must come and visit, saying that I have blood ties in homelands to die for in the continents across the world of my imagination, and a family tree growing in dreams of distant lands. The fact, I say, is that my homeland has grown into such a big spread that it has become a nightmare of constant journeying further and further out. I am like Santa Claus riding the skies in one single mungamba night to reach umpteen addresses, and why? Just to deliver the good of myself, whether the receiver wants it or not. The virus was quite interested in my idea of belonging everywhere, and asked why I took these journeys that bring in more places to crowd up its little world. I say that I begin locally, navigating yellow-watered floods that grow into even greater inland sea-crossings, to reach a rich alluvial plain that feeds shaded gardens, where the people who live there say they do not know me and ask why have I come. Always, I move on.

  And so I travel, fired up with the fuel of inquiry about what it means to have a homeland, to travel further into strange and unknown lands covered with holy dust and orchards of precious small, sun-ripened fruit that are sometimes half-destroyed by war, and at other times, slapped hard in the face by famine. But still, even when I bring gifts to their door, the local people, although hungry and tired, find the courage to reject a person from their paradise no matter how far they have travelled, simply for not belonging.

  I tell the virus that I have felt more at home with the cool air flowing on my face from a wild Whistling Swan’s easy wings sweeping over snow-capped mountains in its grand migration across continents, than in those vast ghostly terrains of indescribable beauty that have given me no joy. I must continue on, to reach that one last place in a tinder-dry nimbus where I once felt a sense of belonging.

  The virus thinks I want what it wants – to hide in a dark corner of its lolly pink bed, where it dreams, in my diseased mind.

  Dust Cycle

  And I hear the clang of their leader crying.

  To a lagging mate in the rearward flying…

  When the world changed, people were different. Towns closed, cities were boarded up, communities abandoned, their governments collapsed. They seemed to have no qualms that were obvious to you or me about walking away from what they called a useless pile of rubbish, and never looking back.

  Mother Nature? Hah! Who knows how many hearts she could rip out? She never got tired of it. Who knows where on Earth you would find your heart again? People on the road called her the Mother Catastrophe of flood, fire, drought and blizzard. These were the four seasons which she threw around the world whenever she liked.

  In every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction.

  They talked about surviving a continuous dust storm under the old rain shadow, or they talked about living out the best part of their lives with floods lapping around their bellies; or they talked about tsunamis and dealing with nuclear fallout on their shores and fields forever. Elsewhere on the planet, people didn’t talk much at all while crawling through blizzards to save themselves from being buried alive in snow. You could bet your life on it – they hardly talked while all around the world governments fell as quickly as they rose in one extinction event after another. You be the judge. Believe it or not.

  Ignis Fatuus = Foolish Fire. That’s you Oblivion! You’re just like that old Rip Van Winkle fella of the fairytale time. They were always calling out to him: ‘Wake up coma man.’ That man who slept like a log, more than an old dog, and kept on sleeping for so many years that when he woke up and went home, his house was gone – just scrub there, and nobody knew who he was anymore. He was empty – like a mystery man. Nobody remembered him. He could have been anyone. They kept poking him in his bony ribs wanting to know, ‘Who do you reckon you are?’, what his name was, and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that? So bloody good job. Serves him right. You should always know where to find your home.

  ‘It was here! It was here!’ That was what the Rip Van Winkle man kept saying. He was just like you for making up stories like that, Oblivion. Nobody liked him either.

  Some say that there was an accident before the drought. A little girl was lost. She had fallen into the deep underground bowel of a giant eucalyptus tree. In a silent world, the girl slept for a very long time among the tree’s huge woven roots. Everyone had forgotten that she even existed – although, apparently, that did not take long.

  Locked in the world of sleep, only the little girl’s fingers were constantly moving, in slow swirls like music. She was writing stanzas in ancient symbols wherever she could touch – on the palms of her hands, and all over the tree root’s dust-covered surfaces. Whatever she was writing, dredged from the soup of primordial memory in these ancient lands, it was either the oldest language coming to birth again instinctively, or through some strange coincidence, the fingers of the unconscious child forming words that resembled the twittering of bird song speaking about the daylight: but the little girl could not understand the old ghost language of warbling and chortling remembered by the ancient river gum.

  Her fingers traced the movements of the ghost language to write about the dead trees scattered through the swamp, where dikili ghost gums old as the hills once grew next to a deepwater lake fed by an old spring-spirit relative, until they had all slowly died. This happened during the massive sand storms that cursed the place after the arrival of the strangers from the sea. Their voices were heard arching across the heavy waves in the middle of the night. All their shouting ended up on ribbons of salt mist that went idling from the sea along an ancient breezeway – travelling with san
d flies and tumbling bats through kilometres of inlet, along a serpentine track, dumped where it could dig into the resting place of the old story that lived inside the ancestral people of the lake.

  The beetles blanketing the lake shook the night in a millisecond that shattered its surface, like precious old Venetian glass crashing onto a pavement. The roar of those harsh-sounding voices from the sea startled the ghosts which rose from beneath the lake’s water – from hearing those men calling out – half past midnight, half past two, echoing from inside several brackets of reeds.

  Sleepy children from the little dwellings around the lake heard voices speaking from large leafy fields of waterlilies. They felt words chasing after them, surrounding their feet like rope trying to pull them back as they ran away. Anyone daring to look back into the lake’s echoes heard voices like dogs barking out of the mouths of fish skimming across the surface as they chased after the hordes of mosquitoes – around four o’clock.

  Those echoes of voices which originated far out at sea were coming from the Armed Forces men involved in a large-scale sweep-up of the ocean’s salty junk, floating about, bobbing and buoyant across the horizon.

  The men from the Army were taunting these haunts of ghosts and outlaws to surrender themselves by dawn because they shouted: Grab your liberation! Freedom! Called ghosts, you what? It was a tragic demand to abandoned steel, planks of timber, brass lanterns and fittings, whose ghost sailors were unable to respond to military voices. But surprisingly, the empty wreckage obeyed. Vessel after vessel crawling out from behind the waves gleamed with the light of the stars dancing with the moonlight.

  A parade of tugs towing the collected ruins churned across the breakers and headed towards land, and while the voices giving orders rose and fell, the flotilla began motoring through the deepwater channel towards the vast lake where the caretakers lived – the Aboriginal people who were responsible for this land. Whatever the men from the Army had been saying to each other on that night of bringing the junk to the lake was quickly forgotten, since around here, the words of strangers meant nothing.